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The consistency of game quality has gone up so much in the past few years that it's very rare to encounter a bad/unplayable game.

As such, reviews on all sites tend to focus mostly on the negatives, while often still coming out overall in favor. RPS tends to be similar on this. What I think is different is that RPS seems more willing to post reviews that disagree with mainstream opinion, or are strongly critical of big games (or elements of them like DRM).

For example, the RPS guys have all said repeatedly that they enjoyed Diablo3. That they focused on a lot of the negative points was , imho, partly because those negative points were more interesting and more important, and partly because other websites don't tend to. they just stick a 9/10 on it.

PS/ Did someone just argue that game prices have gone up???????! I can get 10+ games now for the price I paid for Tie Fighter back in the day..... I just don't have the time to play 10+ games.

The consistency of game quality has gone up so much in the past few years that it's very rare to encounter a bad/unplayable game.

As such, reviews on all sites tend to focus mostly on the negatives, while often still coming out overall in favor.

That's an illuminating comment and well stated. I hadn't noticed that myself but I can see how it could be true.

Shawn Elliott, formerly of Games for Windows Magazine, epitomized games criticism as "this, but this." He intended it as a slight toward wishy-washy journalists afraid to take a stand, but I don't think that caricature looks so grotesque. Criticism is contrast and you can't compare two things without first establishing normalcy.

Hate is addictive, and can be self-defeating. In 1984, the movie, the 2 minutes of hate was designed by the dictatorship to let people veil his frustration. Sometimes I feel RPS is giving us our ration of choco... 2 minutes of hate. And to avoid that, I avoid that type of articles, and read the other articles (problem solved).

The "problem" is that not everyone avoid these articles.

I think RPS know and understand this problem. I don't think RPS want to become a Kotaku, where the most trolling articles are posted to generate a lot of traffic. Theres some dance with the devil here, where RPS sometimes post one of these articles that will atract a lot of traffic and some trolls, but is not all the content here. The big secret of the internet is that if you don't feed trolls, starve and die. If you don't feed trolls, these type of people, the people that love confrontation, insults and hate, get bored on move to other websites.

That makes a bit more sense, tho I find avoiding negatives to be more conducive to a happy gaming life than accentuating positives. (If it was just about the latter, a PR announcement would have sufficed)

Last edited by Nalano; 14-06-2012 at 07:55 PM.

NalanoH. Wildmoon
Director of the Friends of Nalano PAC
Attorney at Lawl
"His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy." - Woody Allen

Game quality has gone down significantly in the last few years. Have you even played any of the major releases this year? Games like ME3, ToR, etc, etc, etc? ME3 is the third in a series and came out however many years after the first one and yet is dumbed down to the point that it's not even an RPG anymore. It's a third person action game with interactive cutscenes. ToR was just a pile of shit.

'Oi - I was under the impression that ME3 actually had significantly more "RPG" options then it's predecessor had, both in the way of equipping as well as levelling your character (When it came to levelling, it was simply the "more stuff to choose from, as well as different ways to branch" as opposed to the slightly meagre offering of the second game, and the inventory was "upgradeble weapons which all still are different to each other, and the more you take the less you can use your other powers" - which is a huge step forward from the first game, which simply offered 100 models of the same weapon).

Calling ToR "a pile of shit" is not really a well constructed opinion.

Since we seem to be pretty much done with the OP, I'd like to chime in on the "PC master race" thing.

Current console hardware is old. 7 years old. Any PC you bought recently is more or less effectively "the master race" purely by a massive hardware lead. Epic have pretty much stated the Unreal Engine 4 cannot run on current gen consoles and most likely won't run on the Wii U either. I don't want to fuel the fires and I agree the attitude such jokes encourage isn't healthy, but a shift away from consoles is inevitable. "When?" and "For how long?" are the questions we should be asking not pretending they aren't outdated or dragging gaming down in general for the sake of civility.